In Sendak’s world, childhood was beautiful, but it could also be scary, confusing and sometimes horrible. He had little time for sanitized cuteness and lighthearted naiveté.

“As a parent, I read Where the Wild Things Are to my children,” said The Graveyard Book author Neil Gaiman in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “But [my daughter] Holly’s favorite was Outside, Over There, and I must have read it to her hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, marveling at Sendak’s economy of words, his cruelty, his art.”

Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom—where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.

Another excerpt:

INTERVIEWER
What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY
Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Ask this question in different parts of the world, and you’ll get different answers. In a poor country like India, it might be $1 million. In poorer parts of the US, $3 million. In California where you can hardly throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a billionaire, the answer might be $25 million. When I ask myself this question, that’s roughly what my inner-being comes up with.

Of course it’s a complete lie. ;->

How much can you spend?

Now what if we add a rule that says you can only buy things that you can actually use?

The prescription painkiller business was booming in 2009, making millionaires of Chris and Jeff George, twin brothers who operated several pain clinics in South Florida. Unfortunately for them, their customers had a tendency to die, and not always in a subtle fashion.

In November of that year, three customers were on their way to a George brothers’ clinic when the driver tried to weave her Toyota Camry through the lowered arms of a train crossing. The car was struck by commuter train going 79 mph. The driver and a passenger were ejected from the vehicle and died at the scene. The third occupant died six months later.

An associate of the Georges who read about the accident in the paper called Chris George to break the news. “Did it say they were pain clinic people?” George asked.

It didn’t, but the Roxicodone scattered through the backseat of the crumpled car, and on both sides of the train tracks, made it obvious to investigators that this threesome from Tennessee didn’t come to Fort Lauderdale to get tans.

In a country with an unofficial underemployment rate of 20%, the tiny railroad whistle-stop of Williston, North Dakota near the Montana border (population 17,000 and spiking) is currently at capacity: There’s not a motel room to be had in the city, housing prices are double what they were a year ago ($300,000 for a two-bedroom home), and the daily onslaught of new arrivals is reduced to living in their cars, RVs, sporadic tent cities or the rapidly proliferating “man camps” – clusters of trailers in an open field that pack in oil patch workers dormitory style, sometimes six to a room. Access to running water and simple sanitation is so rare that public businesses have had to lock their bathrooms to discourage makeshift sponge baths or the dumping of wastewater. Meanwhile, throughout the region, fast food professionals can make $15 an hour and waitresses start at $25 an hour, with a bonus if they’ll stay in the job for at least six weeks. (Pizza Hut brought in campers-vans just so its counter help could afford to live there.)